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Roxolan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
Maybe only part of the ring is Hermione?
How would that help if Dumbledore Finite the ring? The dispelling doesn't seem that specific.
It wouldn't - but it would reduce Harry's risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Unless that's just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can't treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall's safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I'm about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards' identification of Hermione's killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts's wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)
I think this is the case because there's an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.
And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don't think you can have a fanfic which does.
Maybe you could have an mspaintadventure that teaches science.
For some reason that reminded me of the beautiful MSPA wizardfic. Not that it's scientific or anything!
I hadn't thought of that. Some possible explanations:
1) Quirrel didn't actually use that trick.
2) The wards don't report the deaths of faculty, only students.
3) As long as any part of "Defense Professor" has is alive, the wards don't register its death.
4) The wards did register the Defense Professor's death, but either
4a) Dumbledore didn't notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student's death, and didn't look it up afterwards
Or
4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll's actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll's death to the Defense Professor.
This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into "what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?".
Losing a finger shouldn't happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he'd just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.
So...you're saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn't transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?
He's saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there's holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).
As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it's likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there's Obliviate!)
Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a "partial object" as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.
A desk is not a torus.
But then what was he doing under the covers?
Misdirection?
Although that is evidence against Ringmione.
Misdirecting Flitwick by pretending that he's transfigured a whole ring instead of a partial one? But it would be much less suspicious just to get out of bed, given that what he'd want to hide would be that the ring was transfigured at all.
I was thinking, to leave a false clue that Hermione's body was hidden either in the bed or on his person.
Except he wants to give the impression that he doesn't know anything about the body's disappearance and it's entirely someone else's work.
The more leads Dumbledore pursues that turn out to be false, the less likely it will seem that any future lead is true.
Kind of like how "Santa Clause" told Harry that Dumbledore would take away his cloak, so that when Dumbledore didn't, Harry trusted him more than before the suspicion.
Interesting point.
Of course, he could have removed the gem so that it wouldn't damage the ring when it was transfigured back, and put it on the other side of the desk so that when the rock "fell with a loud crack upon the Headmaster's desk" it wouldn't smash the ring.
But yours is still possible as well.